Looking into the Future from 1911

People tend to look towards the future at this time of year what with the New Year and all... Wondering not only what the next year will bring, but the next decade. Perhaps even the next century! With that in mind, here's a great interview from 1911 (courtesy of Paleofuture) where Thomas Edison guesses what life will be like for us here in 2011. More after the jump...

Of particular interest to me was this part:

"Books of the coming century will all be printed leaves of nickel, so light to hold that the reader can enjoy a small library in a single volume. A book two inches thick will contain forty thousand pages, the equivalent of a hundred volumes; six inches in aggregate thickness, it would suffice for all the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And each volume would weigh less than a pound."

I mean, he's basically describing a Kindle here, right? That's a pretty impressive guess from a hundred years out. Edison really was a crazy genius! Makes you wonder what other predictions he made, right? Well, the more of his predictions you read, the more you come to realize that if you guess long enough, you're bound to get something right (or close enough anyway).

"More amazing still, this American wizard sounds the death knell of gold as a precious metal. "Gold," he says, "has even now but a few years to live. The day is near when bars of it will be as common and as cheap as bars of iron or blocks of steel."

Yeah, try telling that to Glenn Beck!

I should also point out the irony of the Goldline ad sitting just next to this article on the Paleofuture page...

I also liked this prediction:

"In the magical days to come there is no reason why our great liners should not be of solid gold from stem to stern; why we should not ride in golden taxicabs, or substituted gold for steel in our drawing room suites. Only steel will be the more durable, and thus the cheaper in the long run."

Maybe that's where the whole "Streets of America are paved with gold" thing came from? Was Edison on our tourism board or something?